Suppose you have been really sick with the flu. Finally, you feel human again, and you get to your email. Whoa. What a mess. Your inbox is now stuffed with hundreds of messages that you must sort out. Some will be spam, some will go to your trash, and some you will keep to actually read. The biggest and most time-consuming task will be the sorting to reduce the number of emails to those you need or want to read.
There’s a better solution, and that is to set up separate email accounts, so that the sorting is done naturally, in advance. This way, you can prioritize how you tackle your inboxes.
Why Have Separate Email Accounts? And How Many Email Accounts Should I Have?
Here are the reasons why creating multiple email accounts will save you time, hassle, and frustration.
1. Separate Business from Personal
You may want to have different email accounts for different purposes. This is probably the biggest reason for having multiple email accounts.
You probably get a lot of emails that concern your personal life only. You might also have lots of friends who communicate with you through email. You enjoy these relationships and may even use email communications to vent about things at work. What happens when an email ends up in the hands of the wrong person? It could mean a disturbance, but it also can lead to a major security breach.
An email security provider company, Egress, published a survey showing that email is a leading tool for accidental data leaks. And Tessian, another security company, says that more than 130 emails per week are sent to the wrong recipients at large corporations. This could be a disaster.
The other benefit of having different emails to use for your business and personal needs is that you can use a more professional username for business and a more fun and quirkier one for the personal. Litmus, an email marketing services provider, stresses that 42% of people decide whether or not to open an email by just looking at the sender’s name.
To make your email address look professional, make sure it has your name in it. You may go creative to a certain extent and play with combining your first, middle, and last name, shortening them or adding your degree or position. Here are a few examples of these combinations:
- jsmith@gmail.com
- john.douglas.smith@gmail.com
- jdsmith@gmail.com
- johnsmith.writer@gmail.com
2. Separate Projects, Teams, Even Departments
If you are juggling a lot of projects, departments, and more than one team all under a single email address, correspondence will pile up in no particular order other than by the time it arrived in your inbox. Even if you try some of the providers’ sorting offers, you still have all of those emails to pore through. Some are urgent, and you find yourself jumping back and forth among all of the various sub-accounts.
You risk losing focus and may even send out responses to the wrong people. However, if you have multiple email addresses, you can focus on one at a time, respond to the urgent messages first, and then move on to the next.
3. Filter Spam, Subscriptions, and Registrations
Consider this: you provide your email every time you order something online, download from a website, or subscribe to newsletters and register for notifications. Pretty soon, your inbox might fill up with marketing messages, newsletters, special discounts, and offers. On busy days, these commercial emails just disrupt your work.
A smarter way of dealing with emails is to decide what categories of emails you get and set up different email accounts for each purpose. You might have one for online purchases only; then you will receive order confirmations and shipping information there, along with messages about sales, discounts, etc. Another could be for newsletter subscriptions that you do have an interest in. When you have downtime, then, you can go in and check them out all in one place.
4. Manage Public Use with Multiple Emails
Suppose you are a small business owner with a website, social media accounts, and a blog. You have business cards or other marketing materials where you publish your company’s email address and other contacts so that anyone can send you messages. You want interested and potential customers to be able to contact you, of course.
But here is what also typically happens: that email address ends up in the hands of others who want to market or sell something to you. All of a sudden, your business inbox is filled with promotional emails from other companies.
You can set up a separate email account for contact, rather than your main business one. This is why you often see “contact us” notifications with an email such as info@businessname.com or contact@businessname.com. This will reserve your business email account for professional matters.
5. Manage Marketing Campaigns
Some time ago, many were predicting that email marketing was on its way out, given social media, SMS messaging, texts, and other means of communicating with customers. This has not proven to be the case.
Current research shows that for every dollar spent on email marketing, there is an average return of $42. And you know that email marketing is still alive and well because of all those marketing messages you receive yourself. And you will have other marketing campaigns, too, on social media, through direct advertising, etc.
But you want to be certain that each campaign is an individual unit within all of your other marketing strategies and that you can gauge who is responding and who you want to nurture even further in order to get that ultimate conversion — a purchase. You also want to measure the effectiveness of that campaign by tabulating the responses you do get. What better way to do this than to isolate each campaign with a separate and unique email address?
6. Secure Your Online Identity
There are plenty of reasons you may not want an email address to reveal your identity. For example, if you access blogs of your competitors or people with whom you disagree on key issues; if you engage in online discussions, perhaps through Quora or Yahoo; if you write reviews of companies.
In these and other instances, you may want to avoid using your real name or your company’s name. Lots of discussion groups require a valid email address for you to join in. You can set up different email accounts for these purposes, still receive responses to your contributions, and yet remain a bit more “hidden.”
7. Save Time
Any time your personal or business life can be better organized, it’s easier to maintain a healthy balance. Then, you can be more productive, have less stress, and focus better on what matters at the moment. Setting up separate email accounts for all of the various responsibilities and communications you must engage in just makes sense. You get to choose which email to go to and when, and prioritize emails, without having to wade through irrelevant messages.
Are There Any Drawbacks to Having Multiple Accounts?
Having separate email accounts is just the beginning of improving your personal and business lives. Your behaviors have a lot to do with the success of this approach (or lack thereof). Avoid these pitfalls as much as possible:
- You can slip into chaos if you do not don’t prioritize and set up a schedule of checking each of your emails. Hopping from one to another and back again confuses your thinking.
- If you are not focusing on one email account at a time, you can end up sending messages out to the wrong people or from the wrong account.
- If you do not manage each of your email accounts well (e.g., spamming what needs to be spammed, archiving those you have read and successfully responded to), you can end up with lots of old email that is no longer relevant.
What is important to understand here is that you can organize your behavior as much as you organize your email accounts. If you do, the benefits far outweigh the potential pitfalls.
Capitalizing on the Benefits and Avoiding the Pitfalls
- Use Mailbird to manage any number of email accounts in the same convenient interface.
- Use color labels, filters, and folders to better organize your Unified Inbox.
- “Snooze” non-urgent emails and access them for a response when you decide you have the time.
- Focus on one email account at a time. This cannot be stressed enough.
- Use Mailbird’s native Calendar to manage your meetings and other events in the same unified interface and try out the benefits of its sidebar view.
- Activate app integrations in Mailbird and turn your integrated email client into a powerful workstation that allows you to manage email, messengers, events, tasks, and documents.
In the End
Now you can see the benefits of setting up multiple email accounts to better organize and handle your personal and professional lives. As you go through the process, do your research on email clients that offer these services. Ask questions; look for their willingness to make recommendations based upon their expertise. And choose one that will meet your individual needs.
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